Artist (off-screen) holds out a Pocket Palette, water brush, and small sketchbook with two vibrant dots of watercolor (golden yellow and bright red). A firey-red maple tree of the same red is in the background.

Nature Spots: Lisa’s Quick and Fun Daily Practice

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Art Toolkit Team

Inspiration | January 12, 2023

Do you ever find yourself on an adventure, art supplies in hand, but with little time to stop and sketch? Making nature spots is a super simple way to scratch the itch to paint and document your adventure in a quick, unique way.

Artist and Art Toolkit Ambassador Lisa Spangler describes nature spots as “spots of color to mark your observations while out in nature.” Be it a flower, mushroom, rock formation, or alpine lake, making color spots helps you to connect with nature in a way that snapping a photo just can’t match. It becomes a visual map of what caught your eye along the way.

Three rows of 1" watercolor spots and respective written caption. Example: Chartreuse dot with “Creosote” written below it.
An assortment of nature spot strips | Lisa Spangler

Nature Spots is Lisa’s latest creative publication, available online in e-booklet form. The Nature Spots e-booklet was born from her desire to share this joyful, personal practice.

Sample page of an e-book with a collage of images of nature spots on the left, and a text block on the right that begins with “Tame Complexity.”
Sample page from Lisa’s e-booklet | Lisa Spangler

She loves using mini ZigZag books to capture her hikes in the Texan desert. Lisa fills each small page with a singular, large dot and labels it to help preserve the memory! You can easily apply this nature practice to documenting the urban landscape as you stroll through the city.

Lisa is leading a challenge for the month of January to get people to do a nature spot a day, so if you’re interested in participating, visit her Instagram page or website to learn more and tag your posts with the hashtag #NatureSpotChallenge. Her blog is also an excellent resource for all-things-nature-spots and more!

We highly recommend browsing the hashtag #NatureSpotChallenge. We love seeing the colors and textures others are spotting in nature. It doesn’t matter that we’re already a week into the new year; making nature spots is a flexible practice that you can easily incorporate into everyday life. Come along!

The Nature Spots e-booklet by Lisa Spangler is available here.